Two to try: shrimp and clams basking in a creamy yellow curry ($15.95) and a tangy salad of wood ear mushrooms and okra ($6.50). Round out your turnip cakes and siu mai with some contemporary Cantonese plates. Fang smartly nabbed the recipe from MingHin Cuisine, where he worked previously as a server. Best in show: the sweet egg yolk buns, which are like warm little cream puffs.

But other times, it pays off spectacularly: Turnip cakes feature all the crisp, wobbly, and creamy textures you could want, springy siu mai really taste of pork and shrimp, and stuffed bean curd skins come with lacy jackets that shatter against their steamy insides. 7 The 17-year-old dim sum mainstay serves up delicious barbecue pork buns and deep-fried taro dumplings. That’s a risk, and sometimes you get overly large and doughy har gow with the shrimp filling flopping out or a perplexing taro cake so dry you need to gulp tea. The dry chili chicken alone is worth the wait. Hours Breakfast, lunch, and dinner daily for pickup and deliveryĪt D Cuisine, first-time restaurateur Danny Fang offers about two dozen types of “artisanal dim sum” ($3.65 to $6.95), which means they’re handmade - never out of a freezer bag.

Perfect order Turnip cakes, siu mai, wood ear salad, curried shrimp and clams.While this is a sad development for dim sum culture (one also felt in Chicago’s Chinatown), there may be a silver lining: Smaller, nimbler restaurants that serve a limited selection of dim sum have begun to pop up in unlikely locations, including the heart of Lincoln Park. Mournful dispatches note how rolling carts laden with steaming baskets of dumplings, trays of baked pastries, and vats of congee have largely been replaced by paper check sheets. From Hong Kong to London, San Francisco to Flushing, Queens, the world’s great dim sum cities are losing their trollies.

Chinatown dim sum chicago tribune